Saturday, October 26, 2013

Homeless In NYC

Longing & Living

In an article in The New Yorker, Ian Frazier looks at the increasing problem of the homeless in New York City, which includes families residing in temporary shelters. If there is a statistic worth noting it's this, Frazier says: “In any case, it’s inescapably true that there are far more homeless people in the city today than there have been since 'modern homelessness' (as experts refer to it) began, back in the nineteen-seventies.”

Frazier writes:

Most New Yorkers I talk to do not know this. They say they thought there were fewer homeless people than before, because they see fewer of them. In fact, during the twelve years of the Bloomberg administration, the number of homeless people has gone through the roof they do not have. There are now two hundred and thirty-six homeless shelters in the city. Imagine Yankee Stadium almost four-fifths full of homeless families; about eighteen thousand adults in families in New York City were homeless as of January, 2013, and more than twenty-one thousand children. The C.F.H. says that during Bloomberg’s twelve years the number of homeless families went up by seventy-three per cent. One child out of every hundred children in the city is homeless.

The number of homeless single adults is up, too, but more of them are in programs than used to be, and some have taken to living underground, in subway tunnels and other places out of sight. Homeless individuals who do frequent the streets may have a philosophical streak they share with passersby, and of course they sometimes panhandle. Homeless families, by contrast, have fewer problems of mental illness and substance abuse, and they mostly stay off the street. If you are living on the street and you have children, they are more likely to be taken away and put in foster care. When homeless families are on the street or on public transportation, they are usually trying to get somewhere. If you see a young woman with big, wheeled suitcases and several children wearing backpacks on a train bound for some far subway stop, they could be homeless. Homeless families usually don’t engage with other passengers, and they seldom panhandle.

The majority of panhandlers are single and male; many become aggressive when denied what they want, having a sense of entitlement. Many suffer from mental illness and substance abuse, and can be a problem in urban centres. Such aggressive and potentially violent people should not have the freedom to roam the streets and harass pedestrians; this is a matter of public safety.

Homeless families, on the other hand, respond differently to their situation. Such families generally remain anonymous, bearing a burden that they are no longer part of general society. In short, there is a general sadness surrounding them and their future, that they are failures, sometimes through making bad personal decisions, often not. Their children suffer. It has been said so many times that it has now become a wear-worn cliché: it's both sad and surprising that within the wealthiest city in the wealthiest nation, there should remain the problem of homelessness. It is irresponsible and inaccurate, however, to suggest that blame rests solely with Mayor Bloomberg, when there are enough factual reasons why the number of persons and families without permanent affordable housing has increased.

This fact ought not surprise anyone when one considers what has been happening in America, in NYC and in many major urban centres the last odd thirty years or so. The hollowing out of the middle class, the loss of decent jobs for the least educated, notably in the once-thriving manufacturing sector, the structural changes in family life, the loss of meaning and the resulting isolation and alienation, and the reduction of community social programs (including those associated with mental health) have all contributed, to some degree, to the problem of increased homelessness.

These are some of the reasons, but not all of them; and governments cannot fix all of these problems.

There might be another important point worth making: many working families today are a few pay-cheques away from facing some of the problems that this article raises—not only in New York, not only in Toronto and not only in London—but most everywhere in the industrialized world.

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You can read the rest of the article at [New Yorker].

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Yiddish Sites (listed since August 2017)

There are dozens of sites dedicated to Yiddish language, culture and music. Here are some that I have found noteworthy. I will add to the list regularly. If you have a Yiddish site or know of one, please do not hesitate to contact me atpjgreenbaum@gmail.com:

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Afn Shvel(“On the Threshold”), a magazine published by the League for Yiddish, dating to 1941, it is committed to the promotion and preservation of the Yiddish language and culture. It published two double issues a year. Its editor-in-chief is Sheva Zucker;

American Jewish Archive at Hebrew Union College’s Jewish Institute of Religion contains more than 10 million pages of documents. manuscripts, genealogical materials, as well as thousands of audiovisual recordings, photographs, microfilm and digital collections;

Center for Jewish History, in New York City, has 5 miles of archival material (in dozens of languages), more than 500,000 volumes, as well asthousands of artworks, textiles, ritual objects, recordings and photographs;

JewishGen Yizkor Book Project, a database of more than 1,000 yizkor books worldwide, a good number of them have been translated from Hebrew and Yiddish into English;

Language and Cultural Atlas of Ashkenazic Jews,from Columbia University,consists of 5,755 hours of audio tape interviews with Yiddish-speaking Jews from Central and eastern Europe, done between 1959 and 1972 along with around 100,000 pages of linguistic field notes;

Lexilogos, a compilation of Yiddish online resources, including dictionaries, grammar books, and a translation of the Torah (Toyre) in Yiddish;

Milken Archive of Jewish Music, a record of the American Jewish Experience; since 1990, it has become the largest collection of American Jewish music with about 600 recorded works, including a number in Yiddish;

Museum of the Yiddish Theatre, an online museum originating in New York City and founded by Dr. Steven Lasky, has in its collection such items as photographs, theatre programs, sheet music, audio recordings and other documents of some importance and historical significance;

Pakn Treger, (“itinerant bookseller in Eastern Europe who traveled from shtetl to shtetl ”), the magazine of the Yiddish Book Centre;

Recorded Sound Archives (RSA) of Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton contains more than 100,000 recordings of music, a great many in Yiddish;

Songs of My People, a site by Josephine Yalovitser dedicated to Yiddish songs of mourning and of joy;

The National Center For Jewish Film, based at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., is the home to 15,000 reels of feature films, documentaries, newsreels, home movies and institutional films, dating from 1903 to the present; this effort has led to the revival of Yiddish cinema;

Yizkor Book Collection at the New York Public Library provide a documentation of daily life, through essays and photographs and the memoralizing of murdered residents, of Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust. Of the 750 yizkor books in its collection, 618 have been digitalized. Most yizkor books are in Yiddish or Hebrew;

YUNG YiDiSH, a site dedicated to preserving and promoting Yiddish culture in Israel;